5 Effective Ways to Teach STEM to Children

STEM is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. STEM education is of utmost importance. In this article, we are going to highlight a few effective ways through which STEM education can be introduced to children. Let’s begin without further ado.

Encourage your children to be responsible

Responsibility is a significant factor in STEM education. To be honest, it is not only significant in STEM education but is also significant in other fields of education. You can actually go through this article to know how to do that in more detail.

You have to play the role of a football manager. Your players are on the pitch with you on the sidelines. You are guiding them to the goal. You are also motivating them with clear instructions. In such a case, do remember that you are not doing the main job at hand. Your players are the ones who are responsible for bringing the trophy home. You are acting as their guide. Implement the same technique in STEM education. Inculcate that responsibility in children.

Promote curiosity

STEM is a form of education that naturally inculcates curiosity in many students. This is a good thing. Mugging up a set of formulae and concepts isn’t the right way to learn these subjects.

Encourage your children to ask open-ended questions, meaning the questions will have a number of possible solutions. Ask your students to search for the answers on their own.

Promote hands-on-experience among students

Learning something from doing and reflection is pretty compelling. The learning experience becomes pretty enthralling as well as pretty compelling.

Proper hands-on experience will allow your students to see specific phenomena from different angles. Thus, they’ll be able to develop a clear comprehensibility of the underlying principle.

Many of these scientific phenomena might look pretty abstract from the hindsight from the point of view of the students. Hands-on experience can turn these phenomena into something that look pretty palpable.

Point out the different applications of STEM in your daily life

You can take various examples of STEM in your daily life and point them out to your children. We will provide you with a simple example. For e.g.-

You will notice that the oarsman pushes the shore away to set the boat into motion. This is a perfect explanation of Newton’s Third law of motion that says “To every action, there is always an equal and opposite reaction.”

There are numerous examples in daily life. You’ll just have to keep your eyes open and point them out to your children.

Promote a STEM environment outside of school

STEM environment can be promoted by a number of ways:

You can refer to several science channels and show some specific science related programs to your children. There’s a TV program called A.Q. on pogo that’s strongly related to several topics of STEM like physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

You can try the same experiments at home with your kids. Do ensure that you take all the safety measures before you involve yourself and your kid in the experiment.

You can use puzzles, building blocks as well as games as part and parcel of your child’s hobby.

You can engage your kids in various discussions that are related to science and technology.

Online tuitions can also be quite beneficial in this aspect.

Finally, we would like to say one thing. Do keep your faith in your children. Failure might come in the way but do ensure that they do not lose heart from that. Learning from mistakes can sometimes be the best way to succeed. With that, we’ll bring this discussion to an end. Hope you had a good read.

Sudipto Das

Sudipto writes technical and educational content periodically for wizert.com and backs it up with extensive research and relevant examples. He's an avid reader and a tech enthusiast at the same time with a little bit of “Arsenal Football Club” thrown in as well. He's got a B.Tech in Electronics and Instrumentation.
Follow him on twitter @SudiptoDas1993